Ep 35 | Your Feedback Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'd say uh two reasons. One is you always want to know the perception of your stakeholders, students, parents, employees. And you can't just assume what's inside people's heads. If you measure that in a solid, trusting atmosphere with anonymous data and people are feel comfortable that it's anonymous, they're more willing to give you their true perception, and then collectively you have a really good picture, and you should always act on that perception data because people's perception is their reality.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. Have you ever filled out an experience survey and wondered if your opinion ever, you know, makes a difference? Or maybe you skipped the survey altogether because you thought your feedback wouldn't matter or it wouldn't get to the people who can make it matter. My next guest helps ensure your thoughts, opinions, and ideas about Escambia County Public Schools are delivered in a systematic way that matters for your child. She has over 35 years' experience in education as a teacher, principal, and in district leadership. She was named Principal of the Year for Escambia County School District twice and was a regional finalist for Florida Principal of the Year. She now serves as a leader coach for Huron Student Education, where she helps over 100 partner school systems throughout the country improve performance and experience outcomes. Today she's going to share how the education partners with Escambia County Public Schools to make sure your voice is heard, your kids are connected, and the future is bright. UWF graduate, lifelong leader, thoughtful strategist, Dr. KK Owen. Thanks for being here. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. When people in Escambia County think about uh Quint Studer, they think about the uh baseball, Wahoos Baseball, they think about Baptist healthcare, um, maybe like downtown development, improvement. Probably they don't think about school systems here. So, what's the connection between Quent Studer and all he does and the schools?

SPEAKER_01 2:42

That's a great question. And it's a story that not many people are aware of. I first met Quent when he decided to help the leaders in the school district many, many years ago when he first moved here. And he worked with the principals, and I just became enamored with all of his leadership skills and wanted to learn from him. Later on, I learned that he actually started out his professional life as a teacher. He was a teacher for 10 years in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin. He taught at Parker High School, special education students, and always carried that experience with him. And you'll often hear him say that that was a great teacher for him, being a teacher for 10 years, that it taught him a lot about what to do and what not to do. So fast forward a few years and um he met Janet Pilcher. She was the dean of administrative studies out at UWF. He had a connection there because in that particular line of study were school administrators, also hospital administrators and public administrators. So the two of them got to be friends, and he began to talk to Janet about his ideas that these leadership skills would work in schools just like they did in hospitals. She will tell you that she thought he was crazy, which he was not. So he talked her into trying out some stuff. They went to Janesville back to his home district and began to try out some of these leadership skills and processes and uh determined that it did work. So that was the beginning of student education. And Quent and Janet put their heads together and really translated all of the leadership work that had been done in hospitals to improve patient outcomes, to improve patient satisfaction, to improve employee engagement, image in the community, all of those things they just translated into the education world. And the rest is history. They wrote a book together in 2015 called Maximize Performance. And Janet has just recently written a second book along those same lines called Hardwiring Excellence in Education to kind of tell the story of everything we've learned from all of the research that we've done in school districts for the last almost two decades.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

I like how it's data-driven, but I also like that the data doesn't exclude experience. I think that's important because sometimes data in its nature, it's focused on results and it kind of leaves out the feeling that is left with people. But leadership is not just, you know, the results that you can get. It's how you make people feel, whether that's a one-on-one or your organization and what you're doing, the mark you're leaving.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

That's true. Employees will say, and research backs that up. The most important thing to them is having a relationship with their leader. For employees and parents and students and communities, it's about trust. Do we trust our leaders? Do we have confidence that they're doing the right thing? And we now have tools to measure trust and confidence and that kind of feeling that you have about the people that you're with.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

That's so interesting. You do the Huron Student Education does a lot of things, right? Yes. A lot of things. A lot of things. The connection between it and Escamby County Public Schools is primarily the survey service, correct?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

That is correct. We um offer surveys to measure employee experience, parent experience, student experience. We also offer something that we call district support services, where people who utilize the services of all of the district departments can ask their customers, which are normally schools. So principals, assistant principals, take that survey to kind of let departments know how they're doing. How are you serving us out here in the schools? HR, maintenance, transportation, facilities, the business office, all of those departments get rated in five service excellence characteristics. So how are they doing in timeliness, attitude, accuracy?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

That's a that's a measure a lot. That's a lot of people to survey because you're not just talking about the parents and the teachers, and you know, you're also talking about the people who are interacting with the parents and the teachers. So how are you recommending the implementation of all of that data when it rolls out?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

We teach a process to really maximize the data. One of the worst things that can happen is people are asked to take a survey, and that's the last they hear. You've probably taken surveys, as I have, um, in the past, and then you wonder, I wonder if anybody read the results. I wonder if they did anything with the results. So we have a process that really closes the loop on that. So once we measure anything, any of the surveys, we put together the report for a school district or an organization, whether it's the employee, the parent, the student, all of them, that really tells them here are your scores, here's your overall mean for each of the items, here's your mean score out of five. We use five-point Likert scale. And then we have the um open-ended comments. And sometimes those are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, which may be overwhelming to a leader at a school to get back this report that's like, oh my gosh, I I have my report, and then I have 200 pages of comments. But the leaders that I know here in Escambia County and around the country really, they pay attention to those comments, which they should. So we teach leaders to look at their scores, compare their scores to the district's scores. How am I the same as the district and how am I different? Look at your high scores, look at your low scores. Are yours the same as the district scores? Are they different? And then go through your comments, and this takes a while. I've had leaders tell me that, gosh, I worked on it all weekend, 10 hours a day, and I still have 45 pages to go. But they care enough to do that, and what they're looking for are themes. We can't act on every single comment because we wouldn't get anything changed for the better. So what we look for are themes. What are people saying over and over? What are parents saying over and over about the atmosphere at the school, about the feedback they get on their child's learning from their child's teacher, on whether or not they feel welcome at the school. What are people saying over and over? Positive and not so positive, and they pull out those themes. And then we encourage them to share that with your staff, with your teachers and your staff at your school. Here's how we did. Here's our overall mean. Here were the two or three where we scored the highest, and here are the two or three where we scored the lowest. Let's talk about that. And what you're really getting at is we want to know what we do well so we can keep doing that, keep meeting parents' expectations in those areas. So we talk about why do you think we did well? On I feel welcome at my child school. What are we doing that caused that to happen? Then you have that same conversation about the low scores. What would it look like if we were doing better on sending positive notes and phone calls home, for example? That's often a low one across the country. Um, and they talk about ways they can improve that score. Leaders also will share those themes. Here's what I heard from the comments, and it's completely anonymous. So you don't you don't know who said what, and it doesn't matter. Because we don't act on individual comments, they shouldn't act on individual comments, and they shouldn't act on a single score. They should really act on the collective data, which is what we encourage them to do. And then we say to leaders, along with your teachers and your staff, make a plan. What are one or two things we could do differently going forward to improve the parent experience at our school based on the results of this survey? And there's also a danger point there. There's always a chance that we made our action plan. It's a beautiful action plan, and then we don't do it. So we also encourage circle back. Let three or four months go by, circle back in a faculty staff meeting and say, How do you think we're doing? And if you keep doing that, you keep those action steps right in front of teachers, of leaders, of really everybody, custodians, people who work in the office, so that everybody knows we are working on this thing. And that if you focus on one or two things, you're bound to make progress. Often in surveys, people want to focus on everything, and you can't improve everything all at once. You got to really narrow it down to make progress. And that's how we one item at a time, one score at a time, build a better parent experience. And the same goes for employees and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

It sounds like you don't hold the process as a pre proprietary, proprietary um, you know, information that you want people to duplicate what y'all are doing absolutely only on a, you know, uh micro level so that the information is not wasted and the process and the resources and all those poor team members working 10 hours over the weekend every day, that it doesn't go to waste. Is there a potential application here for parents with this sort of process and you know connecting with their their own child's school experience?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yes. I first of all, I encourage all parents to take the survey. When you get the however you get information from your child school, if it's from the school website, from the district website, from a newsletter that comes home, from the marquee outside the school. Um, sometimes it's an automated phone call home, our parent survey is now open. So we encourage leaders, use everything you have available to you to get people to take the parent survey. The more people that take it, the better data we get, the clearer the picture is of what the parent experience is like. And I also encourage people once you get your results and you have your rollout meeting and share the results with your staff and come up with a little action plan, share that with the parents and say thank you to the 129 parents who took our survey at our school. Here's what you said. Our overall mean was 4.3. A couple of the things you said we do well are A and B. And a couple of things you think we need to improve on are C and D. And here's our action plan for improving. If you share that again in a newsletter, in a in an automated calling system on your website, it kind of closes the loop. And parents say, Oh, they listened, they heard me, they paid attention to what I said, and they're taking action. It also tends to drive participation. Parents who didn't take it will see that notification, get that phone call home and say, Oh, I missed the survey. Next time maybe I should take it.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Because they see that, oh, they actually are listening. Oh shoot, I didn't get my voice heard in this matter. So next time. How often does the survey go out?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Annually, which is about perfect timing. We have tried it, as you might imagine, in these years of experimentation, lots of different ways. And we do have a few districts around the country that for a variety of reasons do it twice a year. They do a fall and a spring. Most people do it annually. That way you can make your action plan and um and really dig in and do those actions for a long period of time, and then you can measure again the following year. In Escambia County, they do theirs in the fall, which is good because then you get the results back and you've got most of the school year to work on that and make improvements.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

That makes a lot of sense. So parents using this kind of process, and what would that look like in a home, would you think we encourage parents to take the survey in any way that makes sense to them.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

I would imagine that a lot of people do it on their phone. One of the tricks that I learned when I was a school principal right here in Escambi County was that if you make it easy for people to take the survey, they'll take the survey. So we teach leaders all around, make it easy for them. If you're gonna have a parent meeting during the two or three weeks that the survey is open, get them to take this. Just say, everyone, get out your phone.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Love for you to take the survey right now.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Here's the link.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

You're holding your phone anyway. You've got your phone in your hand anyway. I used to encourage people in the car rider line. Oh, that's a good idea. They're sitting there.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

They have their phone in their hand. We encourage them to listen to the podcast while they're in the car weight line. Yeah. So as I love what I'm in love with is the process of um, I don't know, improvement, where okay, you you get honest feedback, you make it safe to give honest feedback. I think that's probably thing one, right? And then thing two is to um do what you're assess what you're doing well, assess what you're not doing well, you know, high-low kind of thing, and then make a plan from there. And when you describe that, I couldn't help but think of my own experience as a kid when I come home from school, and my my mom, you know, would be like, well, she would hold us hostage with cookies. And because we would we didn't really want to, who wants to talk to their parent, right? But you have sweet treats and okay, I'll sit here for a minute. And it was what good happened, what bad thing happened. Um, but it wasn't necessarily about like the student experience, it was just generalized. And I'm wondering, you know, because you've been a principal and a teacher, and you know, you just touched every single corner of education in Escambia County. Um, that I wonder if you have um any, you know, if there's any parental application for that process, kind of like what my mom did. Um, but for, you know, today's kids.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

I think parents should always, as your mom did, talk to their students about their school experience. And you're right, you get that question. How was school today? Fine. Anything good happened? Nope.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

You know, that you don't know what kids are gonna say. Except for the next morning. Oh, it's um crazy hot day.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah, and they you have five minutes to get the hat. Yeah. I think if kids uh are talking to their parents and parents are talking to kids on a regular basis and asking more in-depth questions, what did you learn today? Tell me one thing you learned today. What's one thing you appreciated about your teacher this week? What do you think is going on with you and your friends at school? How are your relationships going with your friends? If they ask good questions, then kids are going to eventually open up and start talking to them. And they then that get a perception of what's my child's experience like as a student? Because that does impact the parent experience. And parents sometimes, I can imagine that sometimes at home they're actually asking their kids, how should I fill out the survey? You know, I'm sure that happens. Yeah. I'm sure that happens. Although kids get their own chance at school. Yeah, they take the student experience survey while they're at school.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

And that's part of the collective data. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

And we also have this is interesting. There are correlated items on there. There are items on the student survey that are linked to items on the parent survey, and that and we look at those to measure are they the same or are they way off? Is the parent experience with being respected at school, when they come to school, the same as the child's sense of being respected at school? So we have about six or seven items that are correlated in that way. And that's something interesting that when we do the analysis, we'll share that with leaders. Here's something you might want to look at. There's the vast difference here, these are the same. And when those are good and they're correlated and when they're high, you want to celebrate that and really talk about why are we, what are we doing that's making parents and students feel respected at school.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

And how can we duplicate that exactly from yeah, and from year to year? That is so interesting. You helped implement start as well, and I love that. Um, we did an episode about that. And so for those that don't know, it's the program Connecting New and Seasoned Teachers for Mentorship. And I kind of see a theme here in connecting perspectives. You were just talking about kids' perspective compared to parents and uh how that correlates to the data that comes out, which impacts the action. So the nerd in me is so excited right now. Especially because don't you find that people separate, they tend to, they like to separate social sciences from these, you know, hard sciences. And but really when the two come together, I mean, that's a little bit more accurate to the human experience. And if you're not trying to improve the human experience, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Yeah, exactly. And we've learned over and over and over again that it takes both sides.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

I would agree.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

I've heard Quentin talk about the hard skills versus the soft skills. And I believe he's right about that. That if you only have the hard skills and you can crunch data and get a test result, you're missing half of it. The soft skills matter. Those people skills, we say people first.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

It does matter. It matters a lot.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

We're in the people business.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

What does what difference does um that connecting make versus just cycling through the educational system as is, right? Because obviously the educational system, although America is a young country, you know, it's been around in some form since then. Why are why is it important to do these sorts of surveys um when, you know, we've kind of gotten uh along just fine, you might say, or maybe not, it depends on who you are, without them.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

I'd say uh two reasons. One is you always want to know the perception of your stakeholders, students, parents, employees, and you can't just assume what's inside people's heads. If you measure that in a solid, trusting atmosphere with anonymous data, and people are feel comfortable that it's anonymous, they're more willing to give you their true perception. And then collectively, you have a really good picture, and you should always act on that perception data because people's perception is their reality. You can sit and say, Well, that's not true. I'm reading these comments. This is not true. It may not be true, but it's their perception that it's true, and therefore you need to pay attention to it. Secondly, I would say the world is changing all the time. And we learned that during the pandemic. We actually switched during the pandemic from our normal annual surveys to what we call our pulse surveys, rapid fire, where we did them, some people did them every six weeks, every two months, every quarter when we were during the pandemic time, because it was a really important time for schools to learn some important lessons. We may have to do that again someday. So it was important to measure during the height of the pandemic what are our parents thinking and perceiving about the school experience that we're providing online to their child right now? How are kids feeling? How are employees feeling? Are they isolated? So we and we made those very short. People had a pretty short attention span during the pandemic.

unknown 23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

They had a pretty short patient. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

So we switched gears and very quickly, um, and our survey team is awesome. They just were able to turn that around really fast. And so we served a lot of school districts with those pulse surveys so that we wouldn't take a long time to do an in-depth analysis. We actually made it so that it was instant results. I mean, the minute the survey, you could check it every day if you wanted to during the time the survey was open. And so leaders got their results immediately and could act fast to improve perceptions or find out why is that one so high? What are we doing well, so that they could keep doing that to meet the needs of parents and students and employees. So I think those two reasons. The world changes and we have to keep our finger on the pulse and and perceptions matter because they are people's reality.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

I think I would add to that that taxpayer dollars pay for, you know, the school, right? So you would want it to be uh something that you help design, at least through feedback. Absolutely. Absolutely. Take the power you can get, folks. Like do the survey. Does it always still come out in the fall? Or when is the survey, when should parents look for the survey in Escambia County?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

In uh 2022, I looked it up. The uh survey was from November 7th through November 18th in 2022. So normally once there's a cadence going of what time of year we do employees and what time of year we do parents, um, I would predict, we haven't set any schedules for the next school year yet, but my prediction is that it will be approximately the same time.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Okay. So however, you said the school typically communicates with parents to keep an eye out for that and make sure to not miss it because it's not a whole month window, it's like two weeks.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

It usually is, about two weeks. Okay. Um, we have some districts that keep theirs open a month, but what we found is the people that are gonna take it are gonna take it in that first 10 days to two weeks. And we teach, we'll send out reminders, but very often we get very few in the latter part of the survey because you're either gonna take it or you're not. Right. Um, we do encourage leaders to make it easy for people to message well, not just here's the link to the survey, but this is why your feedback matters to me as the principal, to our teaching team, to our custodial team, to our office team. It matters to us what you think. You are our customers and our stakeholders. And that message coming from the leader of the school or coming from a teacher is really important because those are the people that parents have relationships with. They may or may not know a school board member or the superintendent. They may not know the principal that well, but they usually know their child's teacher. So if you can message through a teacher, it's really important to me that that you take the survey because we study these results and we act on them. That matters to parents coming from someone they already have a relationship with, and that's usually the teacher. Sometimes it's someone else, a guidance counselor, assistant principal, principal. But so we encourage people, get the messaging out there right to encourage people to take it, remind them and make it easy for them. So if parents want to just make a little mark on their calendar for around November 1st next year, that if they haven't heard about the survey yet, reach out, reach out to their child school and find out when's the survey going to be open.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

And parents talk to each other. So they should maybe remind each other or encourage each other, especially if one parent has the link. It's pretty simple. Again, with the phones, you can just forward it to your friend because, you know, that way it doesn't all rest on the shoulders of the teacher or the administration. Parents can kind of spread the word that way.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

That would be great if people would help us out by getting because we always want more and more and more participation. That's it's I don't think it's ever happened where we had 100% participation in any of the surveys, but it would be great to have more and more and more parents take the survey.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Well, as we wrap up, what's something that you would want people to know about Escambia County Public Schools?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Escambia County Public Schools educate everybody. This community values the work that the school district is doing each and every day. As a teacher and assistant principal, a principal and a director in this district. I saw the hard work and the passion. Everybody here, with very few exceptions, everybody is committed to the purpose. Everybody's clear about why we do this very difficult work. And all through the pandemic, people stuck with it. And after the pandemic, people stuck with it. And all the turmoil that's happening out there in the world, people who care about the future of the world and kids and families and this community in particular, they just keep doing it every day. Whether it's a bus driver, teacher, teacher aide, superintendent, principal, school board member, we just keep on. And that's the power of public education and a system like Escambia County System.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

Well said. Thank you again for joining me today. This was amazing. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Escambia County Public Schools.